SlashNOT

BillyBobG writes: Admitting that “It doesn’t look like we’ll ever really get things patched up.”, Microsoft has officially given up on attempting to secure Windows products.
“Basically, we’re saying enough is enough. What’s the point in all this escalation? The hackers attack, and we counter-attack and then try to patch things up. It’s gone on really too long, and it’s not good for the end-users. It’s time for Microsoft and Windows to move on separately, and hopefully more productively.”

This isn’t the first time that Microsoft has divorced itself from a major product offering. In a wrenching, candid talk with the company’s Intellectual Property Lawyers, CEO Steve Ballmer lays out the case for moving on.
“Well, when we stopped supporting MS-DOS, things had been moribund for quite some time. It wasn’t a bad or insecure relationship, but without integral support for networking it was like MS-DOS was always out of place in workgroups. MS-DOS was always too focused, and unable to concentrate on more than one thing at a time. And let’s face facts, MS-DOS was never going to win any beauty contests.”

“Windows 3.1? That was always an interrim operating system. I think everyone knew that, and we didn’t make any real commitments to it. You know, the MS-DOS thing was still going on at that time, and we were going back and forth between MS-DOS and Windows. It was pretty, but there wasn’t any intelligence behind it. When Windows 95 came out, nobody looked back.”

“The Windows 95/98/Me thing was a real heartbreaker. Just the sort of operating system you’d want to have at home. Beautiful, powerful, but completely unstable. Try to push more than a few things at once and the OS would just come completely unglued. Windows 9x was almost neurotic really. Just when things had been going fine for months and you really started to trust it—Pow—It would just freeze up. But it was a fine product, and I think that’s why things went on for as long as they did.”

“Windows NT—wow, what can I say. When it first hit the office in the mid nineties, it was all business. But with the 4.0 update, man, it got goodlooking fast. You wouldn’t think a three year old operating system could just completely update its look like that. NT4 really got things working at the office. Finicky though and frankly it could be difficult to working with others. But after six years, it was getting a little stale. The update in 2000 really upped the Ante though—fixed all the NT4 issues, but that’s when the security problems really started to creep in.”

“Windows XP was what finally did it. The interface changes were tacky frankly, but what are you going to say “Gee, I know you just spend two years and 100 Million on your new look, but it kind of creeps me out?” Nope. You just stick with it, and try to maybe tune it towards a more classic look. But the security problems were horrific, and right out of the gate. We caught hackers all over that OS. It’s like it couldn’t block anything. Even now, there are some ways we haven’t figured out that Hackers are having their way with XP. You find files on the hard disk that you know you didn’t put there. You do a netstat and find it’s listening on ports and providing services you never authorized. There’s only so much a company can put up with. Jesus, Windows can just go Open Source itself for all we care.”